Friday, June 29, 2018

Life is Like a Pyramid

Pyramid at Giza (photo: Nina Aldin Thune)

Life is like a pyramid. The early years constitute the
bottom in which there's a level playing field. You exist with numbers of other
infants. Every year the terrain narrows until as with mountain climbing, if you are lucky, you
arrive at a high point where the air is thin and there are few who have made
it. The perils of ascending most peaks become greater at those heights. The final ascents are often are characterized by steep and dangerous grades, similar to the pitfalls some
individuals face due to sickness, accidents or other acts of God, which can
interrupt a climb before it has even begun. Of
course, it can be disconcerting to see your fellow hikers falling along the
wayside and sometimes there's an aftershock like the concept of après coup in
psychoanalysis when the reality of what’s actually happening only makes itself
apparent long after it’s occurred. It’s not only death too that takes it’s
toll, but from the heights you can’t fail to miss the specter of wreckage left
by those who have experienced pain and loss. You witness the misery which befalls some and not others, who have been
struck down by their circumstances. They might have barely survived the calamity
that characterizes their lives, but they're the wounded who you tend
to, yet are forced to leave behind as you continue along your way.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.